Dr. Friedman:
Type-2 diabetes is rampant in our society. Its rates are increasing dramatically. It is increasing dramatically in young people as well as sort of middle-aged people and you are going to say, what can I do to prevent getting diabetes, I don’t want to get diabetes, I don’t want to have insulin.

So there are three things I recommend – first of all is maintain a good body weight and try not to get overweight. How do you do that? It’s the hardest thing I have to do as an endocrinologist is try to get people lose weight.

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But the classic things are exercise and eat healthy. And I think if you do exercise and eat healthy you have a very good chance of preventing diabetes.

Second thing is, I think you should get screened. So we have blood tests available for screening for diabetes and there is two types of blood tests. So this is a little new idea.

The classic test was measuring a fasting blood sugar. Well you may not want to go in when you are fasting and what happens if you have a normal fasting blood sugar but your sugars are high after meals? You can still have sort of diabetes from that.

So what the new test recommend is called a hemoglobin A1C. This has been done for many years to follow diabetes, but now we are actually recommending this hemoglobin A1C as a screening test to see whether you have either pre-diabetes or diabetes.

A hemoglobin A1C above 7 is pretty sure to be diabetes. The hemoglobin A1C between 6 and 7 is probably pre-diabetes. And it’s good to know that you have pre-diabetes because then you really want to make sure you don’t get diabetes.

If you have a hemoglobin A1C between 6 and 7 you should probably see, you should get a complete fasting glucose and may even want to get a glucose tolerance test to see whether you could have early diabetes.

And then you really want to improve your lifestyle, really try to lose weight, eat healthy foods, eat less fats, probably eat less carbohydrates and you want to watch your hemoglobin A1C and watch your fasting glucose to make sure it doesn’t get worse.

Many times it gets worse. So that would be my main tips is to eat healthy, exercise and get screened for pre-diabetes.

About Dr. Theodore Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., M.Phil.:
Dr. Theodore Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., M.Phil., specializes in hard-to-diagnose-and- treat cases of adrenal, pituitary, thyroid, and fatigue disorders. He's been with the University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine since 2005 and serves as Chief of the Endocrinology, Metabolism and Molecular Medicine Division at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. He also served as Director of the Multi-Disciplinary Chronic Fatigue Clinic at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center from 1998-2000.

Dr. Friedman has a private practice near Beverly Hills, California as well as privileges at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Martin Luther King Medical Center.